Parlour

A voice for your home. Private by design.

Parlour turns the Mac you already own into a voice assistant for the whole house. Your voice never leaves home.

Download for MacRead the docs
Someone in an armchair asks for the lamp to be dimmed, and the speaker on the side table answers.“Dim the lamp a little.”Done.

Just ask. Parlour does the rest.

  1. Speak from any room. Say the wake word and ask. Nothing is recorded until you do.
  2. Transcribed on your Mac. Your words become text right there. The recording never leaves home.
  3. Answered at home. A model on your Mac takes care of it, using Home Assistant, timers, search and the accounts you connect.
  4. The cloud, only when it helps. Just that one question goes to the cloud model you choose, as text. Never your voice, never the keys to your home. Or leave it off.
  5. Hear the answer. Spoken back in the room you asked from.

One hub. A voice in every room.

A Mac mini on a shelf does the thinking. Everything else is a satellite that listens, passes on what it hears and plays back the answer. Satellites run no models, so almost anything with a microphone will do. Automations can ask too, in plain text.

The hub

Mac mini

Runs the models, holds the keys and does the thinking. It listens too.

  • Kitchen

    Voice PE

    Answers through Home Assistant.

  • Study

    Another Mac

    Finds the hub by itself.

  • Bedroom

    Your phone

    Hold the button and talk.

  • Hallway

    Your own hardware

    Streams audio over a socket.

The wake word, transcription, model and voice all sit inside the house. A single dashed line carries one question, as text, out to a cloud model, and only when it helps.Your Mac, at homeWake wordTranscriptionModelVoiceCloud modeloptionalone question, as text

What you say stays at home

The wake word, the transcription, the model and the voice all run on your Mac. No account to create. No server in the middle. When a cloud model helps, it sees a single question as text and nothing of your home.

  • You decide what it can touch. Parlour controls only what you expose to voice assistants in Home Assistant.
  • Closed until you open it. Until you set a token, only the Mac it runs on can talk to it.
  • Everyone is treated the same. Parlour does not tell voices apart, so the whole household gets the same answers and the same permissions.
  • One Mac does the work. It needs macOS for now, because the models are built for Apple silicon. If that Mac is off, nothing answers until it is back.

Made for Home Assistant

  • “Turn the heating up a degree.”
  • “Close the blinds in the study.”
  • “Is the back door locked?”
  • “Lights off downstairs.”
  • “Set a timer for the pasta.”

Lights, heating, blinds. If you have exposed it to voice assistants, you can ask for it. Expose more and Parlour can do more, with nothing else to set up.

Mute it from Home Assistant, so an automation can keep it quiet while everyone sleeps. And the voice satellites you already own can answer through Parlour too.

Parlour for iOS Coming soon

Your whole house, in your pocket. The iOS app talks to the hub at home and brings HomeKit along with it.

  • Ask from anywhere at home. Hold the button, speak, and hear the answer from the same assistant as every other room.
  • HomeKit, built in. See your rooms and accessories, and switch things on and off with a tap. It still works when the Mac at home is off.
  • Finds your hub on its own. No addresses to type. It discovers Parlour on your network the moment you open it.
  • Answers even when home cannot. With Apple Intelligence, your phone can answer by itself, entirely on device.

Make it yours

Pick the wake word, the voice, the models and the search you want, all by name in one config file. Teach it your house rules in plain markdown. And if you want something that is not built in, plug it in as an npm package. The provider guide shows you how.

Up and running in minutes

npm install -g parlour
parlour init          # gets what it needs, asks a few questions
parlour text          # try it by typing, no microphone needed
parlour start         # and now out loud

All you need is a Mac with Node 22 and Homebrew. Every other room just needs a microphone. Rather skip the terminal? The menu bar app does it all with buttons: download it for a Mac with Apple silicon. Parlour answers to hey_jarvis out of the box, and you can teach it a name of your own in an afternoon.

Free and open source

Parlour is free and MIT licensed. There is no account and no subscription: it costs $0 to install and run, and pricing covers what the optional cloud services cost.

Bug reports, questions and pull requests are all welcome on GitHub, and help answers the common questions. The most helpful thing you can add is a provider: a new voice, another speech engine, or a Linux service manager.